Credit Card Fees and eGovernment

Are you one of the Utahns who were a little upset when you found out you had to pay a $3.50 "special fee" to register your car online this past year? Nearly 213,000 people coughed up the special fee -- a total of an extra $745,500 Utahns had to pay -- from August 2001 to July 2002 to renew registrations on cars, trucks, snowmobiles, trailers and boats...

Three quarters of a million is a significant chunk of change. The article quotes the Governor and I on the issues surrounding fees for online services and strategies for reducing them. The biggest challenge we face is that most of the revenue collected through fees is already appropriated, so an agency like the Tax Commission isn't free to use some of the money they collect for licensing a vehicle to pay the credit card company. They have to get that money somewhere else. The somewhere else is usually a special "online fee."